The Eyes Have It

I never trusted Putin - anyone who rose through the ranks of the KGB would always be suspect in my eyes, if not evil incarnate.

But Bush, that brilliant appraiser of character, thought otherwise. He knew he could trust "Pooty-Poot", because he looked into his eyes and saw his soul. Really.

That's not what the rest of us saw.

Putin values criticism and freedom of speech as much as dear leader does. But he takes a much more pro-active course.

Alexander Litvinenko, and ex-KGB agent, died in London recently of polonium poisoning. He had been a vocal critic of Putin, and a supporter of Anna Politskaya, a journalist who was exposing the genocidal crimes Russia was committing in Chechnya*. He was not the first. According to the AP, many Kremlin critics have fled Russia or been imprisoned during Putin's time in office, and a few have been killed or died mysterious deaths.

October 7th, 2006: Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of the war in Chechnya who exposed human rights abuses by Russian and Kremlin-backed Chechen authorities, is fatally shot in her apartment building. No suspects have been arrested, and Putin has suggested Russians seeking refuge from Russian law enforcement abroad could have been behind it.

Feb. 13th, 2004: Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a former separatist president of Chechnya, is killed when a bomb blows his car apart as he leaves a mosque with his son in Qatar. Russian security services deny involvement, but two Russian intelligence agents are convicted in Qatar and later returned to Russia, where authorities suggest they are set free.

July 3rd, 2003: Yuri Shchekochikhin, a liberal lawmaker and journalist who investigated high-level corruption for Novaya Gazeta, Politkovskaya's newspaper, dies after a brief, mysterious ailment that causes him to loose his hair and suffer severe skin problems. Colleagues claim he was poisoned and that his autopsy was not released to relatives.

April 17th, 2003: Sergei Yushenkov, a liberal lawmaker and vocal critic of Putin, the Federal Security Service and the war in Chechnya, is gunned down in Moscow in a killing colleagues called an attack on democratic ideals. Mikhail Kodanyov, chairman a rival branch of his Liberal Russia party backed by self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, is convicted ordering the slaying and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

As Stalin once famously said, "No man, no problem." Putin seems to have taken this teaching to heart.

Аnd this list does not includeUkrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, who was poisoned with dioxin during the 2004 campaign (he was running against the Kremlin's candidate and leading), nor Yegar Gaidar, former Russian PM and opponent of Putin's, who was hospitalized recently with unknown poisoning.

And those are just the ones we know about.

Watch out for Tsar Vlad - that's not holiday cheer he is offering!


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* Chechnya is Putin's Iraq. He started a war there to assure electoral success; he won the election, but the Chechnyan and Russian people have suffered from the never-ending conflict since.